A book by Mohammed J. Kabir

Structure of the book

The book is structured in six parts, starting from httpd server installation and ending covering the performance and scalability of the Apache Server. Even it was written long time ago, the book still remains a good reading to understand how Apache httpd server runs and how to administrate it for optimal functionality.

Part I: Getting Started

In this part the author explains how to get Apache up and running with minimal changes to the default configuration files so that you can get Apache httpd server up and running on your system as quickly as possible. You can install httpd server on Linux and/or Windows machines.

Part II: Website Administration

This part focuses on typical Web administration tasks such as virtual Web-site creation, user authentication and authorization tasks, monitoring, logging, rewriting and redirecting URLs, proxy service, and the like. You learn a great deal there is to know about creating and managing virtual Web sites. You master various methods of user authentication, authorization, and access control techniques. You learn to monitor Web servers and to customize log files for analysis.

Part III: Running Web Applications

The practice of serving static HTML pages is almost a thing of the past. These days, most popular Web sites have a great deal of dynamic content. People do not visit Web sites that do not change frequently. Therefore, it is important to know how to enable dynamic contents using CGI scripts, Server Side Includes, FastCGI applications, PHP, mod_perl scripts, and Java servlets. This part shows you how to use all of these technologies with Apache.

Part IV: Securing Your Web Site

Ensuring Web site security is a critical part of a Web administrator’s job. In this part, the author discuss the various security issues that can arise with Apache, and how to resolve these issues by using various tools, techniques, and policies or guidelines. He also shows you how to turn your Apache server into a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) – capable Web server using either the mod_ssl or Apache-SSL modules. You are also introduced to the potential risks of running SSI and CGI programs and how to take preventive measures to avoid these risks.

Part V: Running Apache on Windows

As the title says, you will learn hot to install and run Apache on a 32 bits Windows platform. With Apache 2.0, the performance of Apache Web server under this platform has become very promising. I am using too, as a localhost environment and so far so good.

Part VI: Tuning for Performance and Scalability

Like any good application, Apache can be fine-tuned beyond the initial configuration for higher performance.
In this part, the author shows you how to speed up Apache by tuning the configuration, and you will also learn how to create a scalable Web server network using multiple Apache Web server systems.

Conclusions

A comprehensive book about how to install, configure and tweak the Apache httpd server. Examples accompanied the subjects debated. A good start for reading about the Apache httpd Server.

References

The book itself. Well, I did not find any direct link to the official publisher’s site. Wiley is the successor of Hungry Minds, but doesn’t have any records about this book. If you search on Google about the title’s book you’ll even find an electronic format of it.

A book by Elliotte Rusty Harold

A few words about author

Elliotte Rusty Harold is an internationally respected writer, programmer, and educator, both on the Internet and off. He got his start writing FAQ lists for the Macintosh newsgroups on Usenet and has since branched out into books, Web sites, and newsletters. He’s an adjunct professor of computer science at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York. His Cafe con Leche Web site at cafeconleche.org has become one of the most popular independent XML sites on the Internet.

Subject covered by the book

The author speaks more to a website page author and less to a software programmer. XML is a markup language and not a programming language. The book covers the following aspects: you’ll learn how to validate documents against DTDs and schemas, how to author XML documents and make sure your XML is well formed, how to format your documents with CSS and XSL style sheets and how to build large documents from smaller parts using entities and XInclude and to connect documents with XLinks and XPointers.

The book is structured in five parts, starting with the simple things of introducing XML and ending with XML applications, and the data flows on more than 1150 pages.

XML is for structured data

XML is ideal for large and complex documents because the data is structured. You specify a vocabulary that defines the elements in the document, and you can specify the relations between elements. XML is a document format, a series of rules about what a document looks like. Comparing with HTML which has predefined elements, with XML you can define your own elements with the limitation that they are not completely arbitrary and have to follow a specific set of rules. An XML document has to be a well-formed document.

Document Type Definitions

The second part of the book covers how to validate XML documents against DTDs. A document type definition lists the elements, attributes, entities, and notations that can be used in a document, as well as their possible relationships to one another. It is set of declarations of rules for the structure of elements in an XML document.

Style Languages

To style the output of an XML document you can apply the rules of CSS, as used for HTML documents. But you can use the more powerful XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) which includes both a transformation language and a formatting language. The third part of the book covers both aspects, XSL Transformations (XSLT) and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) with examples to understand well how XSL works.

Supplemental Technologies

This part of the book is about XLinks, XPointers, XInclude and Schemas. XLink is similar with HTML link but is not restricted only to <A> (anchor) tag, which is a more flexible approach.
Schemas address a number of perceived limitations of DTDs, including a strange, non-XML syntax, namespace incompatibility, lack of data typing, and limited extensibility and scalability.

XML Application

This last part introduces more deeply in XHTML structure. XHTML 1.1 is much more practically extensible.
It is divided into abstract modules, each covering a specific area of functionality, such as tables, forms, images, structure, and text. The HTML elements and attributes are structured in 28 modules. For the most part, however, standard HTML pages require most of the modules. It’s when you begin mixing XHTML into your own XML applications that you can take advantage of smaller subsets of functionality.

Conclusions

If you want to learn how to use structured data with the help of XML and XHTML this book is a good start. Aspects are well explained and accompanied by detailed examples. Even it was released in 2004 is far from being obsolete.

References

XML Bible, 3rd edition - ISBN: 978-0-7645-4986-1